Excellent Adventures in the Living Room Theatre

[loki's wrangling]

Just wanted to tell y'all that I had an excellent online game of PtA with my Korean gaming buddies, only using d10s instead of cards. It was about high school pop stars and was a truly fun session, will be posting an Actual Play thread eventually. For now I just wanted to let Matt know what I call the game in Korean: In English it translates back to "Excellent Adventures in the Living Room Theatre," and reads "An-Bang G'k-Jang Dai-Moe-Hom." Living Room Theatre, or An-bang g'k-jang, is colloquial Korean for television. Moe-Hom means "adventure," while the "Dai" prefix signifies great, excellent, or big.

I put in the prefix for two reasons. First, in Korean the word "adventure" by itself signifies a risky and speculative venture as much as (or more than) it means a fun adventure. Adding the "dai" prefix erased the former connotation. Second, the Korean language takes on a certain rhythm at four-syllable-three-syllable progressions, which is why Korean poetry often runs in a series of three and four syllable words. Thus "An-Bang G'k-Jang Dai-Moe-Hom" is simply catchier than "An-Bang G'k-Jang-i Moe-Hom(Adventures in the Living Room Theatre)." I'm pretty proud of the job I did, in case you can't tell. :-)

All the main game concepts have been translated into Korean, too. "Issues" became "Goe-min," or "distress." "Abilities" became "N'ng-ryok," which translates back to the same thing. "Connections" became "In-maik," again roughly the same thing. "In-gan Gwan-kai," or "Relationships" would have served as well, but I wanted to preserve the two-syllable symmetry. "Fanmail" became "Fanletters," which is how we call it over here.

[matthijs]

Great :) At first I thought this thread would be about Keanu Reeves doing Shakespeare in somebody's salon...

[John Harper]

Perfect translation. I have had a few excellent adventures in the living room with PTA, myself.

[Matt Wilson]

I like the translation better than the original title.

[loki's wrangling]

Glad people like it. (But...Keanu Reeves? :) I've introduced a lot of indie games to the online gaming community in Korea and translated a few of the titles("The Shadow of Yesterday" became "The Shadow of the Past," for instance, and "Dogs in the Vineyard" became...well, "Dogs in the Vineyard," only in Korean), but PtA was the most radical translation I made and the one I agonized the most over.